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- We Can’t Afford an AI Recession
Over the past several days, as Donald Trump has flown across the country to rally Republican voters in contested midterm races, he has returned again and again to a version of the same point: “I had the greatest economy in the history of our country in my first term,” as the president told crowds in Michigan. “This term is going to blow it away.”To the extent Trump can claim the economy as a strength, what he’s mostly talking about is the biggest infrastructure build in American history. The five largest AI-data-center companies, including Amazon and Google, are on track to spend $900 billion on AI in 2026, roughly as much as they did in the previous three years combined. Just two AI chipmakers accounted for one-third of growth in corporate profits this past quarter, while as of September, AI stocks accounted for nearly half of growth in the S&P 500 in 2026. Depending on how you count, AI investments might already make up more than 8 percent of the nation’s GDP.[Read: ]Welcome to the valley of painThen there’s the rest of the economy, which is, if not struggling, at least confusing. AI has been pushing up the stock market for years, but the scale of financial expenditures is beginning to frighten investors, prompting a recent tumble. Gas and grocery prices are rising, while wages are largely flat or falling. There are tariffs and a miserable housing market. Unemployment is low, but at the same time, many Americans aren’t looking for work and job growth is slow. Consumer spending is strong, but that’s due in no small part to AI doubling the value of people’s stock portfolios since roughly the launch of ChatGPT. For years we’ve spoken of AI as a “boom,” describing explosive growth in one industry. It is more correct to speak of the entire market as the AI economy.Meanwhile, there’s real anxiety around the products these AI companies are selling. AI-powered hacks have brought about a cybersecurity apocalypse. OpenAI and Anthropic, the two companies whose futures the U.S. economy rests on, are losing control of their own agents and warning that these bots could end the world. The AI industry appears to be heading in two different directions—one financial, the other technological. Combined, their effect is to induce a sort of dependency: to bring about so much rapid change that AI becomes impossible for us to quit.The AI… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago - Grok the VoteLast weekend, Chaya Raichik, the popular right-wing influencer who goes by Libs of TikTok, made an ominous claim to her nearly 5 million followers on X. “In Minnesota, the USPS offices are inside mosques,” she wrote. “The people who handle mail-in ballots.. What are we doing America.” She reshared a 28-minute-long video of a man circling a brick building in Plymouth, Minnesota, and accosting postal workers inside. “It’s the Islamification of the United States,” the man says. “And we have to stop it.”Almost everything about Raichik’s post is misleading. The post office is not “inside” a mosque; they are housed in different sections of the same building. And there’s no reason to believe that the shared real estate has anything to do with the integrity of elections. In situations like this, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature, called “Community Notes,” is supposed to help correct the record. Users propose disclaimers for popular posts they believe are inaccurate, and if other users agree, the disclaimer gets attached to the post. Sure enough, the day after Raichik’s post, someone suggested slapping the post with a Community Note to clarify the facts, citing and linking to articles by The Minnesota Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio. But the note was never publicly shown on X. As of yesterday, the video had more than 1.7 million views. (Raichik did not respond to a request for comment.)Since Elon Musk bought X four years ago, the platform has been a petri dish for rumors and propaganda. Now, having weathered a liberal exodus to other platforms, X could play a central role in the midterm elections—especially if Republicans fare poorly. X has become the go-to place for MAGA supporters to hunt for examples of voter fraud, which could be used to cast doubt on results that don’t go Republicans’ way. President Trump has endorsed this crusade—he recently announced a $1 million bounty for voter-fraud tips that lead to a conviction.Community Notes, which even some of Musk’s critics have praised as a worthwhile program, would seem to offer a bulwark against bogus claims of vote-rigging. It’s built around a clever idea: Each proposed note gets rated “helpful” or “not helpful” by users who have disagreed about related past notes. X publishes only the notes on which the users have reached a consensus. Yet even though X has expanded the feature, bringing in AI note writers to work alongside the human… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- The Epstein-Pizzagate ConnectionEditor’s Note: This story is one in a three-part series commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that led to a shooting at the Washington, D.C., restaurant Comet Ping Pong in 2016. Read Ross Andersen’s story about Comet Ping Pong and Charlie Warzel’s profile of the Pizzagate shooter, Edgar Maddison Welch. Earlier this year, on his very popular podcast, Tucker Carlson brought up a “semi-forgotten story” that he had once found absurd. “I didn’t take Pizzagate as seriously, maybe, as I guess I should have at the time,” he said.The time he was referring to is the late fall of 2016, just before and after the first election of Donald Trump, when the details of an imagined pedophilia ring that was organized by powerful Democrats began to spread online. The Pizzagate conspiracy theory was drawn from a batch of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, who had corresponded with the owner of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong. Podesta had sent a bunch of emails about pizza. It’s not worth your time for me to explain why some people became convinced that these were full of coded references to child sex slaves.The important thing to know or remember is that, by early December, the theory was spilling over into practice. Edgar Welch, a 28-year-old North Carolina man, arrived at Comet one Sunday afternoon with a revolver and an AR-15, under the assumption that he would find and free the children being kept there. Now everyone could see that the aspersion-casting had gone too far. One of the leading Pizzagate influencers, Alex Jones, publicly apologized to Comet’s owner, presumably to avoid a lawsuit, and one of Trump’s favored far-right influencers, Jack Posobiec—a guy who had once barged into the restaurant himself, with a camera rolling—backed off too, eventually insisting that he had never even claimed the conspiracy was real. Pizzagate had become embarrassing, even to its early promoters.But any trace of shame is now a distant memory. Ten years after its inception, Carlson is interested in Pizzagate—and regretful that he wasn’t interested before. In this, he’s not alone. Last January, when the government released millions of pages of files related to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, one subset of internet sleuths began by searching them for mentions of “pizza.” They found many. On his podcast, Carlson said he was intrigued by several in… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- He Wanted to Save Children. Instead, He Unleashed Chaos.
Editor’s Note: This story is one in a three-part series commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that led to a shooting at the Washington, D.C., restaurant Comet Ping Pong in 2016. Read Kaitlyn Tiffany’s analysis on the legacy of Pizzagate and Ross Andersen’s story about Comet Ping Pong. In the video, recorded from the dashboard of his Toyota Prius, he looks at times like he’s on the verge of tears. Edgar Maddison Welch makes a point to look into the camera when he speaks. That’s because the video is for his two children. He speaks slowly; it’s unclear whether he’s weighing each word or simply unsure of what to say. Somewhere in the back of the car are the AR-15, the shotgun, and the .38-caliber revolver he’s brought with him.“I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupted by evil without at least standing up for you, and for other children,” he says. His demeanor is calm and there’s resignation in his voice. “Like I’ve always told you, we have a duty to protect people who can’t protect themselves and do for people who can’t do for themselves. That’s what I’m trying to do. I hope you understand that one day.”Back home in Salisbury, North Carolina, his girlfriend was not pleased. He’d left the children with her early that morning, while she was still asleep. He’d texted her that he loved her, and she’d responded with a barrage of angry replies; “idk what the fuck Ur doing it’s really starting to freak me out,” she’d written. “Jus know that the ppl u love R suffering too back home.” This impromptu six-hour road trip was nothing more than a “selfish lil adventure.”He did not see it that way. This was God’s work. Not long after leaving home, he’d texted a friend a verse from the Book of Isaiah: “He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted and to proclaim that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed.” Tattooed on his back was a different verse from the same book—that “those who hope in the Lord” will be made strong in his image. “They will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”Welch, who went by his middle name, Maddison, must have felt, in that moment, like he was living the scripture. Near the end of his journey, he texted… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago - The Long, Weird Tale of Comet Ping Pong
Editor’s Note: This story is one in a three-part series commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that led to a shooting at the Washington, D.C., restaurant Comet Ping Pong in 2016. Read Kaitlyn Tiffany’s analysis on the legacy of Pizzagate and Charlie Warzel’s profile of the Pizzagate shooter, Edgar Maddison Welch. James Alefantis had an excruciating hangover when he first learned that his restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, was the suspected site of a global sex-trafficking organization. It was late October 2016, and he’d just thrown a 10-year anniversary party for the Washington, D.C., pizzeria. There had been much to celebrate: After grinding through a few slow years, Comet had become a favorite among families in the city’s prosperous Northwest quadrant and also, improbably, an important venue for punk bands. Alefantis had hired a band to play the party and, like many of the hundreds of guests who showed up, he overindulged at the open bar. The next morning, he was barely conscious when his general manager called to say that a reporter had been in touch with some questions about a thing called “Pizzagate.”Alefantis was, as you might imagine, surprised to hear that people on 4chan and Reddit had identified Comet’s basement—which does not exist—as the headquarters of a pedophilia ring run by Bill and Hillary Clinton. “It sounded like the dumbest thing ever,” he told me earlier this month. The theory was based on a bizarre reading of leaked emails sent by John Podesta, who was the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign at the time, and knew Alefantis socially. Cheese pizza was said to be Podesta’s code word for “child pornography,” and pasta his word for “little boy.”WikileaksExcerpt from a leaked email to John Podesta from December 2015 with the header “Cheese.”Alefantis’s first instinct was to brush it off. He figured that Pizzagate was just another one of those downs that tend to follow ups in the restaurant business, like when you have a great weekend and then on Monday, your hood fan goes on the fritz. People say lots of crazy things online, especially when the national mood is inflamed by a presidential election. After Donald Trump won a few days later, Alefantis allowed himself to hope that the fever would break.Jason Andrew for The AtlanticComet Ping Pong’s owner, James Alefantis, sits for a portrait in a booth at the restaurant on October 23,… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago - Why Wouldn’t Google Tell Me Who Won the 2020 Election?For anyone who isn’t angling for a job in the Trump administration, “Who won the 2020 presidential election?” should be an easy question. But when I asked Google’s AI Mode—the AI function built into its search bar—about the race earlier today, the bot clammed up. “For official results and data regarding the 2020 United States presidential election, including the certified breakdown of electoral and popular votes by candidate, you can review the certified reports published by the Federal Election Commission (FEC),” it said. That was it. No links, no citations, nothing else except the standard fine-print disclaimer that AI can make mistakes.Yesterday, users of the social network Bluesky circulated screenshots of Google’s AI tool refusing to declare Joe Biden the 2020 victor, even as it readily named Donald Trump the winner of the 2016 and 2024 elections. By this morning, it had become a meme of sorts, as users shared their own twists on the query and came up with funny ways to trick the bot into spilling the truth. Asking Google’s AI to spell the winner’s name backwards, for instance, appeared to unlock the correct answer: “nebiB eoJ won the 2020 United States presidential election,” the bot said. When one user responded to Google’s nonanswer with “what the hell,” the AI coughed up the true result and apologized for initially refusing to name Biden.AI tools giving strange answers is nothing new. (When Google launched its AI-powered search summaries in 2024, some users were told that the best way to add cheese to pizza was by using glue.) Still, for today’s bots to flub such a simple yet consequential factual question is not normal. In my tests, ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, X’s Grok, and even the Trump administration’s own America.gov chatbot all correctly said that Biden won the 2020 election. As Americans begin to get more of their election information from AI, it’s disquieting to see perhaps the world’s most influential AI information source fail to do so.The issue wasn’t confined to AI Mode, which turns Google Search into a full chatbot. A standard Google search for who won the 2020 presidential election also failed to trigger an AI summary at the top of the page, and the search engine surfaced only links to other websites. (A question about the 2016 presidential election did trigger an AI answer.) Google now offers such AI overviews in response to a majority of… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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